1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method for connecting a terminal to a multi-conductor cable typically comprising extremely thin conductors and commonly used with medical equipment and electronic instruments.
2. Description of the Related Art
Crimp-style terminals are commonly used to connect a cable to a connector. The crimp-style terminal first must be connected to the cable. Often, the size of the crimp-style terminal is selected based on the thickness of the wire, namely, the size of the conductor(s) and the thickness of the insulation. Once the selected terminal is crimped onto an end portion of the wire, the terminal then can be attached to the connector to electrically couple the cable to the connector.
Medical equipment and electronic instruments often employ cables having extremely thin central conductors with small cross-sectional areas on the order of, for example, 0.005 mm.sup.2, so that the multi-conductor cables can be as thin as possible. However, many times, suitable sized crimp-style terminals cannot be found for such thin conductors. Therefore, a slightly larger crimp-style terminal must be used.
As shown in FIG. 3, the crimp height 17 of the crimped portion of a wire barrel 14 of a crimp terminal can be made extremely small to crimp the terminal to the thin central conductor 3 of the thin cable. However, such crimping technique often is not effective in securing the terminal to the central conductor 3. Thus, problems with contact resistance and tensile fracture often occur. In addition, the abnormal force applied to crimpers 7, 8 and anvils 10, 11 of a crimping machine (see, for example, FIG. 1A) to reduce the crimp height of the larger crimp-style terminal increases the incidence of damage to these and other crimping machine components due to wear and breakage.
To avoid these problems, a crimp-style terminal can be crimped to an end portion of a thick cable having thick conductors. Then, the thin conductors of a thin cable can be soldered to the other end of the thick conductors of the thick cable to electrically couple the thin cable to the crimp-style terminal. However, this method is time-consuming and cumbersome because many times, a plurality of conductors must be soldered to each other.